fairity

> Sub 10% of 1 billion is 7 figures

8 figures, not 7

Too many of us are attached to our intelligence. I love this story bc it's a reminder that we should value personal excellence over intelligence. By personal excellence I mean making the most of the intelligence you’re given.

The arc of intelligence in Flowers of Algernon is the same arc we’ll all experience over our lifetime. With old age, we all lose our mental faculties. If we value intelligence, in and of itself, that loss will be very painful. But, if we value making the most of our intelligence, we are resilient.

Applying this framework to Charlie, there’s much less to be sad about. He made the most of the intelligence he was gifted, and that’s what really matters.

I imagine there are many parties interested in taking over WeWork. Given how much commercial real estate has cratered and the shift towards hybrid work, the business model is promising once they reset their cost base through bankruptcy.

I'll be amazed if Neumann manages to come out on top of this deal given how much incentive Softbank has to stonewall him. They've already been fooled two or three too many times by Neumann.

Your story is so similar to mine that I thought you must be my co-founder, except for the fact that just one piece of the story doesn't align.

Congrats on the success - have you thought about hiring a banker to seek an exit to PE?

From personal experience, after eight going on nine years, the itch to work on something new can kick in.

> Why on earth would you want to let someone know that you had a big payout?

One reason is that it can help attract talent & useful connections. If you're a known billionaire, I imagine it's pretty easy to get a meeting with anyone, which could lead to educational & enriching conversations that you otherwise wouldn't have access to.

I'm curious if there's information from ppl who've experienced this type of publicity, where they thoughtfully evaluate the pros & cons, and evaluate how they net out.

> One major disadvantage of 2-4 is that other people tend to hear about it

I don’t doubt this, but I’m curious: why do you see the publicity as a disadvantage?

> Fifteen months into the regulatory review process, Figma and Adobe no longer see a path toward regulatory approval

How in the world did it take fifteen months for regulators to reject this? That’s an absurdly long time to be operating a business in limbo, and I have to assume it’s the regulators dragging their feet since the companies have every incentive to move quickly.

I don’t have an opinion on whether or not the merger should be approved, but regulators need to make up their minds quicker or else you can expect a serious chilling effect on M&A. Can you imagine agreeing to get acquired knowing that it can take up to 2 years to close? Anyone operating a real business would be crazy to sign on for the distraction.

23andme is a public company and seems to already be headed towards bankruptcy. Their share price has fallen by 93% since going public, and they’re burning something like $400m per year on $240m of revenue. I wonder if this incident will be the nail in the coffin.

The size of his streaming audience is largely predicated on his perceived skill though. So, he may hypothetically feel pressure to cheat in order to impress his audience.

People here are so gullible.

Do you really think the board is so incompetent as to not have thought through Microsoft's likely reaction?

And, do you really think they would have done this if they thought there was a likelihood of being rebuffed and forced to resign?

The answer is, no. They are not that incompetent.

I wish Sam & co the best, and I'm sure they'll move on to do amazing things. But, the recent PR just seems like spin from Sam & co, and the press has every reason to feed into the drama. The reality is that there are very smart people on both sides of this power struggle, and there's a very low probability of such a huge misstep on the board's part - not impossible but highly unlikely imo.

The only exception I can see is if Ilya&co foresaw this but decided to act anyways because they feel so strongly that it was the moral thing to do. If that's the case, I'm sure Elon's mouth is watering ready to recruit him to xAI.

Whenever there's a large financial incentive to cheat and low consequence for getting caught, it's safe to assume that there will be sophisticated attempts to do so.

I think both these preconditions are met (in spades) when it comes to online poker.

As far as I can tell, there's no way to stop collusion in the following form:

- Create a large remote team of cheaters

- Have them all multi-table PLO at the same online casino

- Each participant randomly chooses tables to avoid anti-collusion tracking

- With a large enough pool of cheaters, you will inevitably have multiple colluders at the same table

- Sharing knowledge of your whole cards with other colluding table participants will give you all a huge winning edge

Since there's no way to stop the above, and there's a large incentive with low consequences if caught, I assume cheating is a huge problem in online poker. Wondering if anyone can confirm/deny this?

It’s pretty obvious to me that WeWork, the brand, is going nowhere. With commercial real estate prices crashing and shift to hybrid work, this is actually the perfect time for WeWork’s business model to take off.

The problem is they’re locked in long term leases that haven’t reset to today’s prices - an unnecessary cost base that wework will free themselves of through bankruptcy.

If I had to guess, after going through bankruptcy, wework (or a direct competitor) will re-emerge as a billion dollar company. If I had time, I’d be looking into taking over their office spaces myself.

I think behind most big failures (at least the ones where meaningful revenue was generated) is a healthy, sustainable business idea.

Oftentimes, the founders just grew too fast or flew too close to the sun.

So, there’s an opportunity to pick up the pieces and rebuild, or start from scratch with the learnings.

In most cases, the firm handling liquidation auctions off the firm’s assets, so if you have the motivation to pick up the pieces and grind out a sustainable business, you can usually purchase the tech and customer lists for six or low seven figures (varies based on size of business of course). If you actually pursue this, my advice is to make your offer as simple as possible (don’t ask for a bunch of diligence) and set an expiration on your offer so they don’t shop around. The liquidators are often not incentivized to maximize value - they just want to finish the project as painlessly as possible.

And so it begins. A large wave of unprofitable startups that raised in 2021/2022 are going to fail at becoming profitable and be forced into fire sales or bankruptcy over the next 12 months.

The capital constriction really started in Q3 2022. Here's a graph: https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Screenshot...

If I had to guess, bankruptcies like this peak sometime next year since many of these companies will find a way to last 24 months on their last fundraise.

Another recent example is Clutter, a moving company that raised $300m, who was forced into a fire sale for $30m.

> But most software company exits are now PE deals (something like over 75%)

Can you provide a source for this? I don't doubt it, but I'm wondering if this is accurate for startups that have raised seed+ funding.

> Companies positioned to achieve such scale should consider it, but those that don’t meet the threshold (e.g. $200 million ARR with 30% yearly top-line growth) would benefit more from focusing on the private equity path

I’ve found that the founder community is woefully undereducated on the potentials of exiting to private equity. And, I believe it’s partially because VC’s (and YC) want founders to shoot for the moon instead of taking a lower (albeit life changing) outcome. I feel like there’s a giant opportunity for a PE firm that simply invests in founder public relations and educates them on the path to a PE exit.

> If you raise VC money, the above scenarios are considered a failure. You will have to shutdown/get acquired for nothing.

There are several noteworthy exceptions to this generalization.

If you retain board control, you’re free to run a lifestyle business and pay out dividends to you and your investors. Plenty of VC funded companies have founder-controlled boards.

Also, you can negotiate a buyout of your VC’s and shift to lifestyle once you fail to grow.

Where is a PE firm involved here? Betterhelp is owned by Teladoc, which is a public company.

> besides the fact that there are lots of jobs around the Bay Area and LA, why would anyone want to settle down in California?

Weather and proximity to a beautiful coastline.

There’s a huge wave of startup failures coming, due to the overexuberance in 2021.

Basically, a large chunk of the unprofitable startups that raised in 2021 are going to fail at becoming profitable and be forced into fire sales or bankruptcy.

A recent example is Clutter, a moving company that raised $300m, who was forced into a fire sale for $30m.

These founders are going to learn the hard way one of the reasons why VC’s were willing to assign sky high valuations (bc they have downside protection)

Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8b on June 2, 2021, 3 months after the all-time high for traffic.

> So why does this topic have such poor comments?

I’m sure this won’t be a popular opinion, but I believe it’s basically class warfare at work. You have, here, a lot of upper middle class engineers whose egos are protected if they believe that the richer class is greedy and unethical.

Nice sounding story, but do you have a source that debt lent to PE backed companies has negative real returns, on average?

Baby steps. Once people learn to delegate transport entirely to a third party, that third party can more easily facilitate the transition to more efficient transport vehicles. Do you care what type of airplane you fly in?

I think you’re assuming (incorrectly) that Google will have a monopoly on SDC technology. There are already many big players in the space, so the profit maximizing strategy is probably much closer to what the consumer actually wants.

It doesn’t seem to me like there’s a big competitive moat other than $xxb in R&D costs, so if there is unmet consumer demand for self-owned SDC, it’s probably safe to assume someone will cough up the R&D costs.

Google or someone they partner with will likely be an option. Another will be Cruise or whoever they partner with. Or, Tesla.

I took one of these in Phoenix, and realized how easy it would be to rob/kidnap/assault someone in a SDC. If you simply surround the car on all four sides, the car will refuse to move.

All it would take is 4 thugs to surround the vehicle and you would have to give up all your belongings. In the current world, you’d just run one of them over but that’s not an option in SDC’s.

This combined with the fact that the cars are easily identifiable and trackable via the app seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not sure what you could do other than arming vehicles.

> I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber.

Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.

> Thirteen years later, that's my default plan. There’s just too much downside for me to get distracted with others’ opinions of my opinions. [1] It's not that I'm afraid of expressing my opinions. I just think, "Why bother?"

Is it really true that she's not afraid though? It's a perfectly natural & understandable reaction to be afraid of the internet mob shouting you down.

The reason I ask is bc we should be honest about the problem, so that we can solve it.

Perhaps the solution is to teach the good, sensitive people around us how to have thicker skin, so they don't have as strong of an emotional reaction to internet backlash. But, detaching yourself from ego is actually a really hard skill to teach & learn. It almost seems like a hopeless endeavor when you're talking about creative people who are already very busy.

Thanks for sharing, below is a quote from the same post.

> Thirteen years later, that's my default plan. There’s just too much downside for me to get distracted with others’ opinions of my opinions. [1] It's not that I'm afraid of expressing my opinions. I just think, "Why bother?"

Is it really true that she's not afraid though? It's a perfectly natural reaction to be afraid of the internet mob shouting you down -- the first time I went through this, I was extremely distraught.

The reason I ask is bc we should be honest about the problem, so that we can solve it.

Perhaps the solution is to teach the good people around us how to have thicker skin, so they don't have as strong of an emotional reaction to internet backlash. But, detaching yourself from ego is actually a really hard skill to teach & learn. It almost seems like a hopeless endeavor when you're talking about creative people who are already very busy.